<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Arabic-L: Thu 03 Jan 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <<a href="mailto:dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu">dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu</a>></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To post messages to the list, send them to <a href="mailto:arabic-l@byu.edu">arabic-l@byu.edu</a>]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:listserv@byu.edu">listserv@byu.edu</a> with first line reading:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> unsubscribe arabic-l ]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Directory------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1) Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">2) Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1)</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Date: 03 Jan 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">From:Andrew T Freeman <<a href="mailto:andyf@u.washington.edu">andyf@u.washington.edu</a>></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; ">Oh --<br><br> I cannot stay out of this.<br><br> 1) Suppose the order in the past/perfective tense is VSO.<br> a) the question in my mind is: Do we count the subject markers as<br> i) "morphology" and therefore part of AGR?<br> ii) or nominal case pronouns that are written onto the verbs as an<br> historical accident to save velum and stone carving effort?<br> 2) if we go with 1)a)i) then we need to do a bunch of INFL & AGR magic<br> 3) if we go with 1)a)ii) then we clash with every Arab speakers native<br> intuition with regards to the default constituent order in their<br> dialects, except for w/ Moroccan, Yemeni dialects (probably others)<br> where VSO in the main clause for perfective is not unheard of.<br><br> With imperfective the VSO order clashes with the SVO in the embedded<br>subject pronouns and in subordinate clauses with referent NPs.<br><br> So whatever you do you have more than one word order with a lot of contextual determinants forcing one order or the other.<br><br> It turns out in the Newspaper genre that SVO (even in the perfective) is a lot more prevalent than what you see in other literary genres, but all you have to do is scan the Machine Translation errors in Language Weaver or even Sakhr and more than a third of these errors involve misidentifying the following NP as the verb's object instead of the subject (thereby ruining the verb valences for the entire rest of the sentence). This is strong evidence that VSO is the dominant word order for Standard Arabic, !except! in subordinate clauses and with the embedded subject pronouns.<br><br> As far as I am concerned if "native intuition" is your *only* source of data, then you are in trouble once you start working with Standard Arabic (or High German for a speaker of Swiss German for that matter).<br><br> I will say that in order for someone to make a full accounting for the facts of the grammar of Standard Arabic that you will find in any corpus of post WWII Arabic, you will need to make some allowance for the fact that there is more than one unified grammar and lexicon at play. This becomes especially true if you start looking at more informal uses of Standard Arabic, such as TV shows in front of live audiences or the ever-present "talking heads" show. Even with chat-room data, where the matrix language is usually a dialect, you still need to make some accounting for facts from Standard Arabic. Once you step into a cafe or train station in the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis), you just cannot ignore French either.<br><br> Given these data from the over-whelming majority of all actual uses of the language, I don't see how you can explain even the simplest facts without having a formalism that allows the researcher to model mixed lects. I don't have to look very hard in my corpora to find data where there are obvious elements from Standard Arabic and a dialect in the same sentence sitting comfortably alongside elements that can arguably be from either.<br><br> Given that mixed lect usage is the day-to-day reality for more than half of the language users on the planet, what explanatory power can any formalism/theory lay claim to if it restricts its theory and formalism to the study of "pure" and/or "core" grammars?<br><br><br>Dr. Andrew Freeman<br>Software Design Engineer microsoft<br>Masters student University of Washington (Professional Masters in Computational Linguistics)<br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">2)</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Date: 03 Jan 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">From:Ahmed Saleh Elimam <<a href="mailto:asaleh1111@yahoo.com">asaleh1111@yahoo.com</a>></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Hello<br> "the question is which word order is the unmarked pattern?<br>As far as i know VSO is the default structure and SVO (as well as other variations are marked, some are marked more than others though). the thing with word order is its effect on meaning. the item that getrs foregrounded gets focused. <br> I have writtenan article on this topic with examples of several arabic wrd-orders. it will be published in june, 08 inshalah<br><br> Ahmed<br></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">End of Arabic-L: 03 Jan 2008</div></body></html>